Board of Supervisors Adjourned Meeting - Joint Meeting with Charlottesville City Council and the University of Virginia   10/28/2020

Good afternoon everyone.

It's my pleasure to call to order this afternoon a joint meeting between the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors, the Charlottesville City Council, and the University of Virginia.

The supervisors who are electronically present at this meeting are Supervisor Bea LaPisto-Kirtley of the Rivanna District, Supervisor Elizabeth Palmer of the Samuel Miller District, Supervisor Diantha McKeel of the Jack Jouett District, Supervisor Ann Mallek of the White Hall District, and our Chair, Supervisor Ned Galloway of the Rio District,

I am the vice chair, Donna Price, of the Scottsville District.

Our chair, Mr. Galloway, is on travel and is a little concerned about the connectivity through the internet, so I will be acting as chair during this meeting.

He may have to drop off and then rejoin us by telephone.

At this time, Mayor Walker, I would like to turn it over to you so that you may introduce your city council members.

Thank you and again welcome everyone.

Ms.

Mayor Walker?

Present.

Vice Mayor McGill?

Here.

Councilor Hill?

Alright, thank you.

Thank you, Mayor Walker and President Ryan.

Sure.

Thanks very much and thanks to Mayor Walker and Chairman Galloway for your leadership and to all of you.

for all that you do for our community.

I am joined here by Kevin McDonald, who is our Vice President for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Community Partnerships, and JJ Davis, who is our Chief Operating Officer.

And I don't know whether she would say she's part of our party or independent, but I see Barbara Brown Wilson here as well.

who is a member of the faculty at the School of Architecture and the executive director of the Equity Institute and Ben Allen.

Or Ben, you're the executive director.

I'm the faculty director.

And Ben Allen, who's the executive director.

I would just say by way of introduction that I'm really pleased to be here in a part of this effort.

I believe making our communities more equitable and inclusive

is both the right thing to do and the smart thing to do.

You may have heard me say that I think the University of Virginia should be both great and good, and for that to happen, we absolutely need to be a diverse, equitable, and inclusive community.

But we also need to be a great partner to Charlottesville and Albemarle County.

And we started some of this work.

We formed the President's Council for UVA Community Partnerships to help identify some of the key issues facing the community and are now working on how we might tackle them.

and we also launched and funded the Equity Institute that brings faculty and community expertise to bear on racial and economic inequities.

And it's also why we're planning to do a review

of our staff hiring, retention, promotion, and procurement policies to make sure that those are equitable.

I say all this not to take credit but just to make it clear that this work really does matter to us and I'm thrilled to be here and look forward to continuing the work with all of you.

Thank you, President Ryan.

I'm glad that we were able to convene this meeting as the three regional partners who, if we are more in sync,

can create a better life for the citizens in our community.

I am often sitting, especially in the time that we're in now, the unprecedented time that people keep speaking of, wondering how we prevent historians in the future from saying these are things that we could have done differently.

and I think rising to the challenge of not only doing the best that we possibly can in any situation but actually exceeding that.

I hope and it's at least the goal that I have been working from

every day since I've been on council, but especially during this pandemic is the hope that people lives are not in a worse place at the end of this pandemic than it is today.

If we can exceed that goal to make their lives even better, then we have really, you know, stretched ourselves

and it will take all of us coming to the table and looking at things really differently during these times where people have maybe the deficit mentality, you know, stabilization of the city, county or UVA could involve

eliminating positions, cutting, you know, individuals who are already the most vulnerable in our community.

And so it's nice we had this discussion when Ben Allen was on with us for the frontline workers agreement.

It's nice for us to say that we are doing this work, but I think it's actually different when we not only write it down, but we live up to it.

And how do we do that?

And that is what I'm interested.

and I'm not saying that anyone on here is not living up to it.

I do have some thoughts, but that's not what I'm saying in this very moment.

I'm saying that we will have to take a very masterful approach in ensuring that we are not digging a deeper pit for people who are already dealing with poverty, dealing with vulnerability of

job security, economic loss and those individuals that we are considering them first and foremost and leading from that place when we make decisions.

And if that's not what we mean by equity, that we are humbly arriving to a place and making decisions as people who are not necessarily always impacted by those decisions that we make, then we will truly

to come together, sign off on a MOU and create a mandate for ourselves and staff to go out with a charge to actually transform things within our community and not just give lip service to it.

And I think that's very important as we have this discussion today to be honest about

Whether we can stretch ourselves, whether we can't, if we can't, don't just paint a rosy picture with words to say that we can actually make that commitment to it.

And there's one of the points on this whereas is identify underserved communities.

We know where the communities are.

We know who the individuals are.

We don't typically allocate the resources for it to matter after we identify.

I apologize for that ringing.

Thank you, Mayor Walker.

I'm very pleased to have the three organizations here together.

Over the last several years, Albemarle County has been on an intentional journey towards equity, inclusion, and diversity in collaboration with our community and our county staff.

For our community, we have had the Community Remembrance Project to tell a more inclusive history in Albemarle County through historic markers and the Equal Justice Initiative, including the marker in memory of John Henry James.

Our Equity Pop-Up Roadshow visited 20 locations across the county, which allowed us to listen and learn from our residents concerning access to resources, housing, transportation, employment, education, and childcare, to name but a few.

This data is being collated and will be included in our upcoming equity profile.

We've had community conversations about our Court Square property, which really helped us in terms of coming to what we think was a just and equitable resolution of the items that were located there.

Organizationally, we have improved our personnel policies by prohibiting discrimination, harassment, bullying, retaliation, and retooled our harassment and discrimination prevention training.

We've had over 100 employees participate in our 21-day equity challenge, and just recently we revised the county ordinances to include all gender identities.

We have partners.

We've strengthened our local ties with the other partners who serve our community, including Health Equity Access in Rural Regions, HEARR.

We've cultivated the Charlottesville UVA Equity Center, the UVA Library System, the School of Architecture, the Jefferson School of African American Heritage Center, Mitch Health District, Jefferson Madison Regional Library, Simbereras International Rescue Committee, and others.

As we know, the pandemic has disproportionately impacted people of color and those in lower economic groups.

And we know that is due to long-standing health and social inequities.

The pandemic has shown how far we have to go as a community in addressing those inequities.

And like so many things, we know those inequities do not follow political boundaries.

But our community and our nation's responsibility to address together.

We have much work ahead, but we have laid the foundation on which to build the road together.

This meeting with the City of Charlottesville and the University of Virginia leadership is significant, and I want to take a moment to acknowledge that.

We meet here today

to discuss a formal memorandum of understanding for collaboration regarding equity and inclusion.

To provide quality services to our entire community regardless of ethnicity, race, sexual orientation,

gender identity, language competence, socioeconomic status, physical health, or any other demographics that some may say divide us, but we know make us stronger together.

It is my pleasure to, on behalf of the County of Albemarle, to welcome you to this joint meeting.

Thank you, Supervisor Price.

Before we do that, unfortunately, you're going to have to turn it over to me for just a moment.

I'm Gary Russell, the Director of our Office of Equity and Inclusion.

That's generous of you.

I'm going to share my screen real quickly.

Sorry, I don't often use Google Slides.

There we go.

So we did want to acknowledge

that we made just a couple of alterations in terms of timing to the agenda.

So we wanted to run through that real quick with everybody.

We've already had the opening remarks.

We do want to give you guys a review just briefly of some synergistic activities.

We're leaving a healthy portion here in the middle for the MOU discussion.

And then from there, we'll be sharing with you some of the other collaborative efforts

from our partners at the UVA Equity Center, and then our partners and great friends, the Thomas Jefferson Health District.

Then we've got some time at the end for questions and final thoughts.

I would note this agenda was developed collaboratively along with everything else between myself, Siri Russell, our esteemed colleague, Kaki Demick,

the Director of Charlottesville Department of Human Services, and Kevin McDonald, the Vice President for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Strategic Partnerships with the University of Virginia, who will both be joining us here shortly.

Good afternoon, everybody.

Thank you very much, Siri.

The slideshow is out of control and running ahead.

When Kevin, Siri and I sat down to talk about how we might start this conversation around the equity MOU, we started with the question, what kind of synergistic activities might these three organizations engage in should we have an adopted and executed MOU?

And that led us actually to start talking about what synergistic activities

We're already engaged in.

The extent of collaboration and partnership between Albemarle, Charlottesville, and UVA is extensive, and a lot of this work around improving our community and making our community a more equitable and just one has actually already started.

I just wanted to hit the highlights of three major areas of collaboration and synergistic activities, including understanding the proportionality and the justice and child welfare systems,

City of Charlottesville together with UVA expertise from Dr. Richard Mapuche undertook an exhaustive study of disproportionality and disparity in the juvenile justice system with the final report being issued in 2015.

And recently, in February of this year, we received a report around the extent of disproportionality and points of disparity in the adult criminal justice system, which was a collaboration and a study of data from both Albemarle and Charlottesville and was analyzed with expertise from UVA from Dr. Melvin Wilson.

UVA expertise from Dr. Michelle Claiborne helped the City of Charlottesville's Department of Social Services undertake two phases of study of disproportionality and points of disparity in the child welfare system and Albemarle County together with the same Dr. Michelle Claiborne's expertise is undertaking this similar kind of study so that we understand that impact on a regional basis.

Certainly the events of this year have posed challenges to all of the public health systems and human service systems we have and we have called upon partnerships and collaborations and relationships across the community in order to respond well.

Both the City of Charlottesville Albemarle and the Blue Ridge Health District pulled together fairly early to

find creative ways to purchase and distribute PPE to communities of need using a rubric that we borrowed from the city of Charlottesville that uses an equity lens for identifying who is the highest risk and most at need in the community and use that as a tool for distributing our limited resources.

Continue to use that rubric as well.

Albemarle, Charlottesville, UVA, Blue Ridge Health District and Cultivate Charlottesville have collaborated to create a wraparound services model for folks who test positive at any one of the testing events to make sure that they have all of the practical needs including food, shelter available, cash money actually if they need emergency services of any kind and additional practical things like diapers or cleaning supplies after they've tested positive

and indeed Albemarle, Charlottesville, UVA and the Community Foundation all pooled together to create a fairly significant pool of emergency financial relief initially at the very beginning in March and April with funds largely from the private sector and then eventually from funds generally coming through CARES.

Finally, evaluating and planning around equity has been started in all of the communities, each now

Soon, Charlottesville will have dedicated staff focused on racial equity, diversity, inclusion, and Albemarle and UVA already have said staff.

All three organizations have also engaged in both internal and external assessments to understand where things are equitable and where there's room for improvement.

This bolstered our efforts in thinking about today as that collaboration, relationship building, and partnership has largely already begun in terms of working on this.

Thank you, Kaki.

I think I've gotten the hang of Google Slides now, so hopefully I won't be giving away too much preview in this presentation any longer.

We did want to start by just briefly touching base on what we hope will be the outcomes from this afternoon's discussion.

One really being primarily finalizing the language and the content of the MOU that's been presented to each group, and then also

making sure that we are clear on what the expectations for staff and next steps are.

So Kaki was correct when she talked about the fact that we did want to sort of support this discussion with some framing questions just so we could be sure that we're all getting what we need in order to move forward.

And so I'll start with some questions for both groups that are really around the concept of EMOU in general

in a sense of agreement and support for what it's attempting to do, but then also looking specifically about the current language and content that was provided in the draft and receiving some feedback on that.

So with that, I'll turn it to our leaders here.

Thank you, Ms.

Russell.

And also, thank you, Ms.

Demick.

We will start with the Board of Supervisors.

Our order for speaking and asking questions has already been set.

No questions at this time.

Maybe some comments afterwards.

All right.

I'm good for right now.

I was on the board, of course, when we worked through the other MOUs with the city.

So I'm pretty comfortable with the concept of an MOU in general.

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

I really appreciate and understand how important it is to document our processes and our expectations going forward.

So I certainly do think that this MOU is well collected and was granted to hear Kaki's presentation about where we are already beginning because that's inspiring in its own way.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I do not have any questions here as well.

I'm very supportive of the language that's in here.

And, you know, specifically, you know, as is the case with other policies that we set, I think the statement of measurable goals, actionable items, things like that, and how that we're noting if they're being achieved or deemed as important or transparent with our

Thank you.

Thank you.

And I would just mostly reiterate what the other supervisors have said.

I have no questions at all about the concept.

I fully support it, nor do I have any concerns about the language at this time.

Oh, Diantha, I am so sorry.

I skipped over you.

My apologies, Supervisor McKeel.

That happens all my life.

Well, I hesitate to interrupt you, but I did.

I'm thrilled to be here.

For me, this is probably the most important discussion and MOU that I think we have dealt with.

And certainly the most important discussion we've dealt with in decades.

So I'm thrilled to be here.

Do not have any concerns about the language or the content.

and I'm eager to do the hard work.

Thank you, Supervisor McKeel.

Okay, thank you.

The one comment I would make is that I appreciate the inclusion of the pledge to set measurable goals to monitor the progress.

That's one of the things, and we can all feel good about ourselves, but without any actual identifiable indications of what that progress has been, we may just be feeling good and not actually accomplishing anything.

Thank you.

Likewise, I would echo what others have said.

I think the language about being explicit about goals and measuring those goals and having data-driven decisions is really important.

So we're able to monitor the impact of what we're doing or not doing and get a sense of the impact we're really making.

Other than that, don't really have any concerns about the language.

Like everyone, I'm sure I have a lot of questions about what specific next steps will look like in terms of turning this into reality.

All right, thank you.

Thank you.

Again, thank everyone for their work and bringing this work product together.

I also just want to echo just the importance of having measures.

I think as a council, we're looking into that our own strategic planning level, just making sure as we get through this next planning process that we have our own metrics and that they're definable and discreet and something that we can all be committed to.

I do think that there's some initiatives that maybe each jurisdiction may be underway that we should be looking for more opportunities to work together on.

I know that Mayor Walker, we exchanged some emails as a council

prior to this meeting around just the efforts of our own Human Rights Commission.

It's not the only commission that would come to mind for me, some of them fall outside of the equity realm that I think that we should be doing and attacking more regionally in nature, especially given the interest from folks outside of just the city boundaries.

And so more generally speaking, I just hope that through this process, we're able to identify initiatives that each of us has going on that we can then work to collaborate and involve the other two jurisdictions in the case of the university as well.

Okay, thank you.

And just a couple comments.

In the second, whereas we have the equitable and inclusive community and, you know, Mr. Blair, we were just having this conversation, I think over the weekend, but maybe it was Monday, but I think it was over the weekend about using like the terms that we use and inclusive,

versus like welcoming.

So that's not really a big deal, but just something for us to think of.

I mean, I think it's a big deal, but it's something for us to think about that everyone should, it shouldn't be much debate there.

One of the things that I would like for the city and county to kind of, and we've been doing this

a bit, but kind of building off of what other areas have done and even UVAs, the President's Commission on Slavery in the University and the President's Commission in the Age of Segregation.

I think it's something just powerful about not just acknowledging bit by bit, but maybe allocating some significant resources to some kind of truth and reconciliation committee

what that would look like is something that we could talk about a little bit more.

But I think us understanding just the full depth of the participation of former leaders and the decisions they made in our community and how that has led to our current state is something that I don't think that we, any of us fully understand.

And

I have here this book from Greensboro when we traveled down and this is their work that they did a few years ago on their Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission and so it's just something and I'm sure we would have a book

equal the size or larger for our area.

And it's just something to consider just when we are, again, moving forward but understanding the history so that we won't repeat.

And so that's something that I think is worth talking about.

And in the middle section here where we start to

where we pledge to do things.

What I see kind of missing here is just stating clearly, allocating resources.

and so I just think that part needs to be included in the whereas because we can do all of these other, you know, and to do them we will need resources, but I think we leave that out sometimes and then we're kind of questioning where we're going to get the resources to implement the initiatives and then that's sort of left out.

Thank you, Mayor Walker.

and mute myself.

So let me ask whether Kevin McDonald or J.J.

No, I'm supportive in principle.

I think it makes a lot of sense.

It shows the

A strong need for collaborative spirit amongst three organizations.

A statement was made earlier just about building on existing efforts to work collaboratively beyond.

And I think there are a number of examples that we have to build on that, one of which that I would say that I'm excited about is the work that initially started within UVA with the Inclusive Excellence Framework.

that has been adopted at the state level by the governor, but also that we have been partnering with organizations like the Charlottesville City School District, United Way, and recently launched a grant to support organizations that are interested in developing a metric driven approach that adapts to the organization that can be centered in equity like we've done at the university.

And so we're excited about the partnerships that that provides, but I think we just look forward to building on this MOU and utilizing it to really

We have been working collaboratively now for the better part of two years on a broad set of issues, and I think we have really deepened both

An understanding of the city, the county, and the university and how we can find ways to work together to improve, as you stated earlier, to be both great and good.

And I think we've made a series of tangible commitments and will continue to do so.

Great, thanks.

Only that we look forward to being as helpful as possible.

We'll get a little airtime later to talk about how we can offer up our help, but towards those measurable goal setting and tracking, we want to be a resource if that's useful.

Working with Siri Russell's office on the Equity Atlas has been amazing.

Agreed.

I think we have some speaking time later, as Barbara stated.

This excites me just as being my family's along, Charlottesville residents, Albemarle County resident, university grad.

And so it's exciting to see these collaborative minds coming together to address really what our systemic and regional problems are going to need regional and systemic solutions.

I'll just pick up where Ben left off by making the obvious but sometimes forgotten point that there is a very blurry line between UVA, Charlottesville, and Albemarle County.

We are, in a sense, bound together as one community.

everyone who works at UVA has to live somewhere and most of them live in Charlottesville and Albemarle County and then the surrounding counties and so I have no questions at all about the concept of the MOU.

I think it's a great step forward.

Obviously it's a start not a finish and so a lot depends on what happens.

and I have no real concerns about the language or the content of the MOU and this may just be the lawyer in me but I want to flag something that I don't think needs to be resolved here but I would ask maybe that it be run by council at the City, County and UVA and that's in the third whereas where it talks about shared responsibility and advancing equitable outcomes

I just want to make sure that we're not committing to any impermissible quotas.

And again, I may be overly cautious, but I would just flag it and make sure that our lawyers are okay with that language.

Otherwise, I think the memorandum looks terrific.

Thank you, President Ryan and other members of your staff.

At this time, I'll turn it back over to Ms.

Thank you.

Hello again.

So the next two questions we would like you all to consider are as follows.

What is most needed from this partnership and collaboration to be successful?

and in what ways do you hope this partnership will grow our capacity to promote equity and inclusion?

All right.

Thank you.

I would say what's most needed is communication between all three entities.

would be the most important because that way we hear each other's, what each other expects, what each other wants and how we can get to what we all want and how we can compromise in order to get to our desired goal and including community also, of course.

Thank you.

On the first question, the obvious staff changes, Board of Supervisors, elected officials change.

We need regular updates to keep everybody informed, especially between the staff on all three entities and the electeds.

We're

For those that have to put money and staff time to this, we need to be reminded of what's going on and any improvements and of course the metrics we talked about before.

In what ways do you hope this partnership will grow our capacity to promote?

Well, I mean, that's kind of I think that's kind of an obvious one.

Everybody's working together.

The

I'm forgetting the words I wanted to use on that one.

But anyway, if everybody's working together, clearly we're going to have a better outcome and more people are going to be able to participate.

So I'll just leave it at that.

Thank you.

Yeah, thank you.

Let me stay where I want to start.

The first question, what is most needed?

We already have one of the most important things identified and those are metrics and ways to hold ourselves accountable.

I think we also need based on our experience with our other MOUs, we need an identified person or office in all three of our jurisdictions that takes ownership for this.

because we all know if everybody has ownership, nobody has ownership.

And it gets back to that communication piece, but we really need someone from within our organization to take ownership of this for us.

And then that way, someone has the responsibility regardless of how our boards change, regardless of how our staff changes.

In what ways do you hope this partnership will grow our capacity?

I really hope that our three entities at the end of this work really have come together in a much closer partnership experience and that we have established a culture of working together that

We just automatically reach out to the other entities without even thinking about it because that has been really, I think, what's needed and what we're beginning to develop.

So for that, I thank you.

Thank you.

Good afternoon.

Growing up here but living away for 16 years, there still is so much to learn and so much I have learned, especially in the last 10 years that I'm grateful for.

And I think in addition to all the more structural items that people have already mentioned, awareness among all of us as individual citizens that we have learning to do.

and evolving to do and that we need to get away from complacency and learn about different ways to look at things and to solve some of these long-standing issues will really help us as a community to build change because it takes what's happening in the neighborhoods and on the streets to really make this more than just a planning exercise.

And the second question is, the strength in our combined efforts, because all three of us are trying to work on this together, will make it turn out better.

Thank you.

I'd like to piggyback on what Supervisor Mallek's talking about.

In terms of education, it really goes to what Mayor Walker was speaking about when you're looking to the past and truly understanding that.

We're starting this path together that all of us are in different starting points.

in terms of our experiences and our understandings, our thoughts, our beliefs.

And while we're all hoping to move forward, we have to understand that we are in different points as we take these first steps forward.

So to me, it's this partnership, what's going to be needed from it is that, well, one, the willingness and the openness to learn and learn in places and from folks that

We're so used to getting policy reports and staff reports and things like that.

Well, there's a lot of things in this venue that have been learned in different ways and we have to be open to experiencing those.

I think our county board did that in participation as we led up over the last couple of years as we've built to the removal of our Confederate statue in the county grounds.

There's been a lot of education and learning and being open to that information and looking to the past of how this board has been responsible for things.

We need more of that.

We have to have the courage to reflect out loud.

Sometimes, you know, to be able to say I don't know that or I didn't know that or to share something that you might not have an understanding of can be, there could be some fear there.

We have to do our best to try to put that aside.

I think working collectively with other, certainly public leaders, with the support of our staff folks helps us have that courage to be able to do that in a public way.

And in doing that, I don't know if it's the right word to say put egos aside or to put our feelings aside, but we have to be open to hearing where the deficiencies are and not reacting because of who's telling us where the deficiencies are.

We just have to be open to understanding where they are at so that as policymakers we can get to doing the things to try to correct and improve.

and do the things that are within our power to do.

And I think the second question, in what ways do you hope the partnership will grow our capacity?

I mean, like I said, when you know you're in it with other folks, and if you have confidence in the fact that we're all trying to go to a similar goal, that gives you what you need, I think, to actually accomplish the goal that's being set out.

That's what I think this partnership will provide us, that courage, that strength to be open and do the things that are necessary to actually have impact here.

Thank you.

There's not much I can add that the other supervisors have not already commented upon.

I guess what I would just say is mostly in response to the second question that when we work together in partnership, it basically is a force multiplier.

We can have the benefits of the economies of scale

But I also think that what it will do is help us to provide a degree of consistency to our shared residents so that they understand that what you get at University of Virginia or in the city of Charlottesville is also what you're going to get out of the county of Albemarle.

Thank you.

Thank you.

The supervisors have all brought up very good points and I would just really mostly be re-echoing those.

I do think we need to make sure that we look at this as this is coming forward, that there is a holistic look at where we have to be moving towards, but then also identifiable action points and steps forward, because you get to that point sometimes where you know all the problems, you can see the problems, but now how do we start solving the problems?

And I think that's going to be a very important part of this is working together to work on jointly solving the problems.

Because as we all know, the county and the city and the UVA lines, they all blur very often.

Many people in our community came here for UVA and never left.

Many people live in the county, but think they live in the city or vice versa.

So it's a good step forward that we're looking at this together and what we can do together.

As others have said, I mean, in response to the first question, I think

being able to establish clearer lines of communication in ownership within each of the three entities to try to create a more permanent institutional mechanism for doing this work that outlasts specific councils, specific staff will be important to ensure that this is able to have a real long-term impact as well as provide the foundation for

Identifying existing initiatives and making them regional and strengthening partnerships as well as when we are creating new initiatives from the outset, being able to have a regional approach and regional partnerships just as a specific exit to the second question.

A specific example I've thought a lot about is in the city where we've hired a consultant to develop the affordable housing strategy, update our comprehensive plan, and do a zoning rewrite as well.

And there are so many areas that have come up in that conversation of we have a land trust that can obviously operate in both Charlottesville and Albemarle, we have a housing authority which can operate in both

Charlottesville and Albemarle.

With our zoning rewrite, there's obviously a lot of opportunities in the urban ring of Albemarle right outside of Charlottesville in terms of

the impact that we can make there.

And I would hope to see initiatives like that, that this is able to just have us from the outset, have again, that regional cooperation and partnership to leverage those opportunities and do it in a way where we're measuring the impact of the investments we're making.

And I think that will just be critical if we really do wanna make an impact on housing inequality, climate change,

The final thing I would say is I hope that it can provide more ways for us to

Collectively invest our resources as three entities together and find things.

Are there areas where we can avoid duplication or as you know others mentioned find areas where through economies of scale you know if we're working together and sharing our financial resources for an investment will have a bigger impact and I think that will be really important because obviously our budget constraints I think is a huge barrier to this work and if we can collaborate I think we can better overcome that barrier which

in the COVID era is only going to become a bigger and bigger challenge for us.

All right.

Thank you.

One thought that I wanted to express is that we've often in city government, in nonprofits I've been associated with, we've often had occasion to draw on

University of Virginia on the expertise of the faculty, on the energy and the passion of the students.

And I think that we will all benefit from trying to work together and to bring that kind of expertise, energy and passion to bear fruitfully on what we do in the city.

Yeah, certainly communication, which has already been said, is paramount.

But also just this idea of ensuring that continuity, given the level of turnover, both internally and at the electives level and leadership levels.

But most of all, building on that shared commitment.

I mean, we all have to kind of come in this really committed to this work and ensuring that there are structures in place to allow that to continue even past the group of us that are here that are now expressing our strong support.

When I think about the second question, I just go back to just the importance of not siloing each other.

Like I said earlier, just really elevating those existing initiatives that we have and then building on them and not being that this is a city initiative or this is a county initiative, this is a university initiative.

How can we combine all our resources and look at all of these things as joint initiatives that we all recognize that we're serving the same regional community?

And I agree and echo with the points that were made about

um, you know, together, we're just going to be so much stronger at doing that and being able to be much more efficient with our limited resources.

Um, and again, back to what, um, Tara Galloway was saying, you know, mentioning just like, it's important that we all not only just hear each other, but we actually have the ability to listen to each other, um, and to have some grace with each other as we share our, our very, you know, different perspectives and, um, and have the ability to kind of just to learn, um, from all the different things that we bring to the table.

Um, so that was, that's all I can share right now.

All right, thank you.

I think what's most needed to probably make this successful is the clear charge, which I think is something that staff is asking for.

But when we set that clear charge that there's something that can be an immediate win,

And so the first thing that comes to my mind is if we set a goal such as to ensure that people and citizens in both of our jurisdictions

were not any worse off during the pandemic and we set that task for the equity commission to come back to us rather frequently because we're in the pandemic.

So that the story that is told after the pandemic is one of

that's more successful than it could possibly be if that's not a charge that's set.

So those are things that I think are helpful.

And that doesn't have to be the charge.

But something that's clear that we

will not have anything to compare it to because if things are not worse we will not have that story but there will be other jurisdictions other locations that we can say we were headed down this path and we changed course because of the equity MOU because I think all of us have probably made decisions

that we can think of that could probably be in line with what's traditionally being made across other organizations.

And I think the ways that I hope this partnership will grow our capacity to promote equity and inclusion is for us to do it.

For us to say that we're doing that is one thing.

When people start to share those stories is another thing.

If we are, and I say we as in Board of Supervisors member, leadership at the university,

City Councilors, if we are kind of, you know, tooting our own horns at like, hey, these are things that we've done, if it's not a consistent conversation in the community about, hey, you know, this is what UVA, the City of Charlottesville and Albemarle County did, if that's not being told in stories out in the community, and I'm thinking of how stories

were passed down in the black community for centuries.

They were stories verbally told.

And if people are not grasping onto whatever we're implementing and being able to talk about how they have been impacted, how their lives have changed as a result of whatever we're doing,

then I think we're still in a position where we can stretch ourselves a little bit more.

We have to put up a board on a highway to say, hey, these are the things that we did versus people being able to say, these are the ways that my lives have changed.

So it's something that is happening at UVA and something that is happening in the city of Charlottesville, something that is happening in Albemarle County.

So I think that is how I measure

Thank you Mayor Walker.

Thank you.

So I'm going to exercise my prerogative and go first because I'm going to have to duck off the call and I will leave it to JJ and Kevin to finish up.

So I would echo a lot of what has been said and I want to pick up on something in particular that Mayor Walker said.

I do think that the most useful way we could make this collaboration successful is to identify one or two projects to get started on so that we learn best how to collaborate around something concrete.

It could be something discrete.

It could be something broader.

You could imagine us agreeing that we are going to work towards the goal of enabling all children to read at grade level by the end of third grade.

and bring to bear the resources of the city, the county, the expertise and partnership of UVA faculty and students.

But actually getting started on something concrete, I think, would be a great way to

Turn this from a memorandum of understanding into something that is actually making a difference on the ground.

And we'll learn an awful lot in taking something on.

So I apologize that I have to head to another Zoom call.

It's my day-to-day life these days.

But I will hand it over to Kevin and JJ.

Thanks, Jim.

I support all of the sentiments that have been said.

I will only kind of quickly say that I just think we will ultimately need a collective, you know, leverage our collective will to make a collective impact.

I think we have to be committed to being transparent and

sometimes vulnerable, utilizing this metric driven approach to kind of look at our data disaggregated to see what story tells us and committing ourselves to moving in that direction to filling those gaps.

Anyone else from the University of Virginia?

Apparently not.

So, Ms.

I'll just wait.

Thank you, Ms.

Wilson.

I did not mean to exclude you.

Ms.

Thank you, Supervisor Price.

Great, thank you so much, Siri.

So our last set of questions leads us into this space.

What are our expectations for the way that we pursue this work together?

And kind of maybe thinking about it more specifically, how will we know when we've been successful?

And then lastly, are there any other things that we haven't discussed that are missing?

No, I will just say that as a former teacher and administrator, I really like President Ryan's idea regarding using our collective ability and UVA students, et cetera, to ensure that all of our students can read at grade level by third grade.

I think that as an educator, I think

Thank you.

Other than once we set the metrics, we'll know we're successful when we're reaching them on the schedule that we put forward.

I'm not sure what else to say on that one.

And I look forward to seeing

That's it.

Thank you.

I do think a win would really be great for us and it would be a way that we can learn from each other and figure out how to do this because this is a new work for us.

I like the idea of the education piece as President Ryan mentioned.

To me, education is the foundation of everything.

So I like that idea very much.

And with that, I think I'm okay.

Thank you.

Chair Galloway.

Thank you.

I mean, in addition to the things that we're going to set out very specific goals or specific policy initiatives, and there have to be clear outcomes, what the actionable items are.

And obviously, I think that's how we will

figure that out.

But at the end of the day, it can't just be us creating the scorecard and then deciding that we've hit the score.

We met it.

We can't be the... We have to understand that we're not the experts in saying, oh, we've arrived or, oh, we've accomplished this.

These are things that, as I've heard in previous comments here today, that

Community members, we're not the only stakeholders here.

We're not the ones that define the successes.

We are trying to get the policies to get there, but those who are impacted by the decisions we make have to have a say in what those actionable items and goals should be.

Thank you.

And I concur with what we've just heard.

I think we have to have some objective criteria, rationally related, that allow us to see that we have achieved our goals.

And I was really struck by what Mayor Walker said in response to the previous set of questions.

It's not just when we put a billboard up that says we've achieved it, but when our residents see that we have achieved it.

At the same time, however, I know from other areas that very often there is a perception that is not exactly reality.

And so I think part of what we have to do is to ensure that we also provide communication to our residents so they will have it.

Thank you very much.

I think that establishing and carrying out this good process is the next step.

But to me, I can only wrap my brain around our progress and our success based on one individual or family at a time.

So those personal successes that our residents achieve will be the way we can

find out if we're getting anywhere.

And I know that our staff throughout all the different departments who have contacts with folks will be able to provide us with those kinds of updates.

All right, thank you.

I don't have anything really much more to add that hasn't been said but I do think that giving our staffs clear direction in it and as was mentioned I think by Supervisor McKeel in the earlier round of questions around just making sure that we have ownership at each of our jurisdictions and that there's that's part of the point I was making around commitment and so I just think that having that clear direction and understanding who's gonna be responsible and also just that we there is a regular update um as we know we were wanting to have this joint meeting

A couple of them this year, and here we are.

It's already almost November 1st, and we're having this first thing.

All right, thank you.

Yeah, I mean, I think a sign that we are being successful is for us to be able to collaborate on something and have it come to fruition where we're enacting some kind of policy change or making investments that couldn't have happened otherwise without this partnership.

And I think once we start to do that, we can build on that success and learn from it and

actually make this something that's changing outcomes.

And briefly, I want to build on something that Mayor Walker said earlier.

I think there are very critical opportunities that are going to exist related to the pandemic coming up that we might not be able to address unless we're acting regionally.

And again, just real briefly, I want to highlight and put a pin in some of these things.

As we enter the fall and winter, our homelessness shelter season is beginning and

churches.

There's a lot of difficulty in getting churches who are able to provide that shelter because of the pandemic and so our homelessness services have been using hotels to house people but the funding sources for that will go away and they may need support in order to keep doing that and if we're not able to do that we may not you know we may be up in the air in terms of being able to house people through this

our free clinic has moved because of the health district expanding which has created new building costs for them that are a substantial change to what they're able to do and I think as our

eviction moratoriums have ended or will end at a state and federal level.

I think over the next six months or so we're really going to start to see the eviction crisis and the housing crisis really accelerate regionally and addressing these things is

I think going to require us to act regionally and figure out how we can strategically collect and invest our resources.

And I just throw those out as some specific examples, but more broadly, I think there's some areas related to the pandemic where if we really want to try to prevent the worst outcomes, we're going to have to cooperate and act regionally.

Thank you.

I was intrigued to hear President Ryan's comment about suggesting the notion of a goal being to have everybody reading, all of our kids reading on grade level and so on.

And when I talk to people in the community about what they're concerned about in terms of equity,

The issue that people mention most often is the question of the achievement gap in the schools.

It's a question of are the kids, both in terms of racial lines, economic lines, a lot of different lines, are kids having equal opportunities?

Are they having equal success?

And it occurs to me that

That's the sort of thing where, I mean, it's always been frustrating to me as a city councilor because we're not technically charged with that as our job.

That's the school board's job.

We have the ability to write a check and not a lot more, but we can, I think, be involved with and try to perhaps work with the university.

If the university could mobilize student help through Madison House or something like that,

to maybe help reach out to some of the kids who may be falling by the wayside in this COVID era when they're not able to do all they need to do with computers and stuff like that.

So there may be some opportunities there with the expertise of the faculty and, as I said before, the energy and the passion of the students.

to address this issue that I believe is the one that if you talk to folks in the community, it's the thing that concerns them most.

Thank you.

I guess mostly I just hope that we will, my expectations is that we will actually develop an action plan and measurements at the same time as this work is being identified.

Again, looking at larger picture, what the larger picture wants to be seen as, but then followed up by actual

Action Steps to get to there, both smaller and larger, so that we can both get quick medium and long term wins in this area to alleviate the suffering that inequity poses.

That's my basic thing.

All right, thank you.

So I think I've talked about my expectation and how we pursue this work together.

I think my comment now is that if we are truly in this together, then we need to make sure that there's a commitment for us to participate in the meetings the entire time.

moving forward because I think at this point Kevin you may be the only one from your team and I don't know if you can make the decisions if we decided to about who at the university would be the

the person that would be doing whatever those next steps that we will spend the next 42 minutes discussing.

So that's my first thought.

And I just, I think anything missing is that probably it.

You know, the leadership to,

Thank you, Mayor Walker.

I'll start and if Barbara, Ben, and JJ may have had to leave, but they can definitely chime in.

I agree with everything that's been said.

I especially agree with the sentiments regarding

how we will know that we've been successful when we know that those that we serve share those sentiments and their standards with regard to what success looks like.

I think we have to be steadfast and remain steadfast in our commitment and continue to lean in to what this kind of assessing equity assessment and metric driven approach looks like.

Sometimes that can be uncomfortable when it points out again

And then, Mayor Walker, to your question, I definitely think that I'll be one of the appoint people.

Maybe depending on what we're working on, it will be an important point of involvement for J.J.

or some other member

of the UVA community.

I know that the Equity Center will be connected to this work and we work very collaboratively together.

And to Barbara's initial point, the President's Council on Community Partnerships will also play an active role.

Yeah, I'll just add to say that the President's Council on Community Partnerships co-chairs has been meeting with President Ryan about every other week.

And I think that that has been a really generative part of keeping that communication line open.

And they're very much in with the same set of goals that have been expressed here by all of our

All of our elected leadership.

And I just have one quick comment if I can.

I'm not cutting anyone off.

I know from my previous conversations with President Ryan, the comment that he made about reading on grade level has been something that he's stated for a while.

And I just would like for us to just think about, economists are talking right now about nail casting versus forecasting and just what

is the most immediate need now.

And of course, what are those longer term goals that people have been trying to figure out the solutions to for a long time.

But I hope this group will, and what this MOU will produce is for those immediate wins, that's something that we

will be able to identify whether it's something we traditionally think of as a win, but know that it has had an immediate impact on the community.

Thank you, Mayor Walker.

Was anyone else from UVA desirous of making a comment?

Okay, apparently not.

So I think we've covered that.

Ms.

Thank you.

Great.

Thank you again, Siri, and thank everyone for the robust discussion thus far.

This is really just another opportunity to highlight the synergistic intersection of our collaborative efforts across our organizations.

And so this is going to be a wonderful opportunity just to hear more about the Equity Atlas.

And the Equity Atlas is really a tool that's helped to visualize information about inequity and opportunity by mapping data

and information.

Yes, thank you, Kevin, for that introduction.

I've had the pleasure of being on a lot of Zoom calls, different with different groups of people on this call, so it's glad to see us all gathered here together.

I'm not going to take too much time in the introduction piece, but I did want to just briefly go over what the design of the Equity Center is, and then definitely Dr. Wilson and Dr. Clayboard can really speak to the work that they have done collaboratively

using the expertise of community partners to include Siri Russell and to include community leaders and activists in developing this Equity Atlas that I think will get to some of the things that have come up during this call about how do we get measurable outcomes and how do we know how we're doing.

and then not using that as a point to say check the box, yes, we achieved this, but to surpass it and to intentionally plan to redress the systemic racial and socioeconomic inequities in this town.

If you could move to the next slide, please.

Interesting enough, this talk of education and literacy is very near and dear to me.

I actually, in February 2020, left the Albemarle County School System as an elementary school administrator, former high school teacher, in a profession that I love because I was actually drawn by the mission of what the Equity Center is intended to be and what the vision it could be.

It should not be, a lot of people have touched on this, it should not be a surprise to anyone on this call or anyone watching,

that there are intentional systemic racial and social conduct problems in our community.

It should be alarming to people and it should be something that we are acting together in urgency about to redress.

The Equity Center was designed to do that, that these systems which were intentionally put in place through laws and legislation and policy, we now have to go about redressing that to reverse

that outcomes for the people of our community.

And I really what Mayor Walker was talking about truly resonates because it does sometimes show up in quantitative data, but it's also the qualitative stories and narratives that we know that the people who are affected by the policy decisions that we make as a region

Next slide, please.

One of the things that is truly at the core of what we're trying to do at the Equity Center is this idea of shared power and authentic partnership.

If I may for a second, the problems that we know when we talk about, you know, a third grade literacy rate,

which have decades of achievement gaps where you know our black students are achieving at sometimes 40 to 50 percent of the year from grades three to eight in the region they are one out of two of them will fail their end of the year SOL or their end of year tests right that should be a problem that is alarming and urgent to others

to everyone.

But one of the things that I think we also need to consider is some of the action that is being led that's community driven through the President's Council and other community leaders and activists is that these problems that we see in education should not be separated into siloed education alone.

That the problems that we know are through affordable housing, immigration problems, access to jobs and wages, health inequity.

And really what we're seeing is the intersectionality of all of these inequities that we are still trying to address.

are playing out in the outcomes of achievement of our students, and we are repeating generational inequality.

And I think we don't have the necessary time to practice and meet and come to this.

I think what everyone is certain is having humility and having an action-oriented goal towards achieving these.

One of the things that I sort of just want to highlight is, that was highlighted earlier, is the work that was done around COVID testing.

That I think what this pandemic has shown us and has forced us to do is to work across and show the power of collaboration in terms of providing support on a regional effort through community leaders at Cultivate Charlottesville.

through community leaders and the different neighborhood associations that have come together to provide these services.

At the core of it, what I really hope the vision of the Equity Center is and the long-term mission is being the service and the sort of helping to facilitate these types of collaborations.

and being there to listen, being there to uphold the expertise of the community leaders, community activists as well as using the technical skills that I think Councilman Snook mentioned that the university can provide to bring awareness to these issues but more importantly have some urgency to make some action on it and so that's really a lot what the Equity Atlas can provide to provide some of that data

of where we're at and how we're doing so we can actually have those outcomes that we all say that we want to have.

With that, I would definitely throw it to Dr. Wilson and Dr. Claiborne because they will sort of speak a little bit about what sort of the ecliatis is and where it can go.

Thank you, Ben.

This is Michelle Claiborne, and I was going to just talk briefly a little bit about what the Equity Atlas is or could be since we brought it up several times.

One of the defining goals of the Equity Atlas is really to bring together information and data that will help decision makers as well as local advocates form both a shared understanding of community needs and assets and of the implications of the choices and the policies that are made by key governments and institutions like ours.

And so to give some flavor of what that might look like, this slide just presents one example from the current Equity Atlas prototype showing the location of city and county parks overlaid on the geographic distribution of children in poverty by census tract.

So arguably the population really most in need of access to publicly maintained green spaces.

One immediate thing that stands out, and you can't zoom in on the slide the way you can on the platform, but one thing that stands out is the scarcity of public parks in several of the neighborhoods with a really high child poverty rate.

So for example, the southern neighborhood on the border of Charlottesville and the Places 29 area, right across the district line as well, in Albemarle County, both have nearly 40% child poverty rates, and you see very few

public green spaces there, as well as parts of Ridge Street and 10th and Page neighborhoods in the Charlottesville area which have more than 50% child poverty rates.

And so this was really just to give a flash example of what we want to help be able to promote and the questions that we want to be able to help leaders answer.

and so all are welcome to explore the tool further.

There's a link on this slide.

The atlas is really intended to make frequently sought data about our community easily available and comparable and combinable so enabling us to better visualize the intersection of residents and resources as we're making decisions or as we're advocating for change.

Again this is just one example and the current platform allows the

anyone to, you know, select local counties or cities within our broader region, along with different spatial geographies like census tracts or block groups to see some of how the resources are distributed.

It allows one to select indicators that capture how we're faring within those key areas identified as priorities by the UVA Community Partnership Council, so jobs and wages, youth and education, housing and health.

and it's meant to enable a visualization about how these measures vary over place and co-vary with one another.

And finally, it has some functionality to add additional information about the location of resources, like in this case, parks, or, you know, potentially things like childcare centers, or to add relevant boundaries, like school attendance zones, or magisterial districts or voter precincts, right, we could really think about, and relatively straightforwardly, add the kinds of things that answer the questions we collectively ask.

So we've begun conversations as well about creating a portal for regional indicators tracked over time for key measures to help quickly convey if we're making progress on improving community well-being and if we're doing so in an equitable way.

This is a need we've heard from multiple community partners, including the City, County and some nonprofit advocates.

And this is some of the work we want to support collaboratively with the City, the County and UVA to collectively identify and focus on additional indicators of central relevance to gather and include more information about infrastructure and resources sought by community members and by leaders such as yourselves.

So the next slide really quickly, while the Equity Atlas is being developed in close partnership with the county and with input from many community organizations and advocates as a more general decision support and accountability tool, the larger democratization of data effort is a jumping off point for even more focused community data efforts.

So on the next slide, if we may, we have

A couple examples of some of that other work that we've been doing this last summer, like on the left is a screenshot.

Again, there's a link in the slide of work to understand the barriers to and enablers of sheltering in place and developing an index to help us understand where resources that ease COVID isolation are more and less abundant within our larger region.

And on the right side is a shot of some analysis around frontline workers in our region here with our region defined as the Blue Ridge Health District or the Thomas Jefferson Planning District.

And this was analysis we did in partnership to support the work of PVCC's Network to Work and UVA Equity Center's Fair Treatment Charter for frontline workers that Mayor Walker mentioned earlier being discussed at a prior council meeting.

That itself is an initiative to advocate for a more equitable economy in the face of the pandemic.

And so these are a little bit more focused work, but I think what I want to convey is the nature of the kind of democratization of data effort to help

both community activists and also community leaders sort of understand and have a shared understanding of what the challenges are and what the possibilities are as we work together.

And in closing, I just want to say we're very excited about the potential of an equity MOU and about working in partnership to understand the needs and the resources

in our cross-jurisdictional common life, right, and working in ways that keep equity at the forefront of decision-making.

Thanks.

Michelle's amazing to work with.

As you heard Kaki saying earlier, she is an incredible, generous mind.

And what's wonderful about all the products that she mentioned is they've all not only been co-produced with people from both elected, administrative, and then activist positions within our community, but also they're all, the actual web environments themselves are also completely shared.

So any other community can learn from what we've done

but we always have a first do no harm commitment that is really guided by community ethics instead of our own blind spot free environments.

I will share one of the things that's come up in the kind of coalition discussions has been a desire for some sort of accountability dashboard.

And this is a screenshot of one from Austin, Texas that was mentioned by a community leader in one of our meetings.

As just an example, we'd be happy to produce something if you all want to identify trends that you want to measure growth towards.

Just know that that's our joy in this little realm is co-producing, working with you all to do things.

And as I said earlier, we've been working with the Siri Russell's office for some time on the Equity Atlas prototype.

And it's just really meaningful for us to be a part of something larger like this.

So we're really happy to do it.

Next slide, please.

And just to kind of restate President Ryan's point from earlier, the reason we were founded was because university towns are some of the most inequitable towns in the nation and Charlottesville is among them.

And we really want to be a part of redressing that.

And we think that research and scholarship needs to be done in service of people, not to them.

and so know that we offer that up humbly to be a part of whatever it is that you all want to guide.

My boss in the Democracy Initiative, Melody Barnes, has said many times that inequity is one of the greatest threats to a healthy democracy and this slide on the

Urban Institute graphic is actually a nationwide slide where talking about the racial wealth gap and how it continues to increase.

So just these issues are very local and they're also very national.

And so we feel a responsibility to not only redress inequity on the local level, but also figure out how we can do that in a way that is worthy of being that story that residents want to tell.

Next slide, please.

And lastly, I'll just say that what's been nice as the leadership that Dr. Allen has built with a really amazing staff at the Equity Center is this critical social infrastructure that now researchers from across the university and beyond have said, I want to help.

I want to be a part of something.

on my own, find those partnerships, but I would be really honored to be a part of them.

And so in many senses, my job is just helping to play matchmaker between the faculty and researchers that have the capacities to be humble partners and that have the desire but don't necessarily know who is wanting their help.

So know that it doesn't have to stop at democratization of data level tools.

If there are other things, this is actually a

Actors Network on a transit equity project that Drs.

Camille Barnett, Andrew Monshine, and myself were a part of that's just coming out right now.

So we can use qualitative as well as quantitative skills and we just want to be helpful members of our community towards those ends.

I think at this point we'll go back around to our, well let me first ask, Ms.

There are not for the University of Virginia.

We do have the Health Department.

I think we'd like to ask questions if possible until after they've had an opportunity to go.

I'm sorry, that broke up.

Yes, let's go ahead and let the health department in.

Thank you, Ms.

Good afternoon, everyone.

Thank you, Dr. Bonds, thank you, Siri, and thanks to everyone for the opportunity to provide a brief update on where we stand currently with COVID, not only in the Health District and Charlottesville, but we'll give a brief overview of where we are nationally, where Virginia is in relation to other states across the country,

And then we'll end on that data portion on what we're seeing in terms of disproportionate percentages of people of color who are impacted by COVID.

And then Dr. Bonds will follow up with a number of activities that we've been working on with other partners in the community to try to mitigate spread, to provide support to those who historically have lacked some of the support that they've needed, and then obviously opportunity for questions.

Next slide, please.

So first I want to look at some data from the CDC that was pulled yesterday showing the last seven days, the cases per 100,000.

For the United States, over the last seven days, the average is 21.2 cases per day per 100,000.

The top four rates are there and they represent areas in the Upper Midwest.

And you can see there are some significant numbers there.

And then I also included numbers for the neighboring states to kind of give you an understanding of where we are in relation not only to those who have the highest rates, but where we are in relation to our region, the Mid-Atlantic region.

and you can see Virginia is here at a 12.8.

This is probably the lowest 5 to 10% across the country and so a lot of the strategies that we're implementing here in Virginia seem to be working.

Whereas if we compare strategies and policy across the country, we may find those differences have created opportunities for greater spread and exposure.

A lot of those strategies include things like social distancing, minimizing the size of social gatherings, restricting visitation to different facilities, and really adhering to those guidelines.

One particular mitigation strategy that we are certainly implementing here a little bit more strongly in Charlottesville and Albemarle but one that's really critical to the spread of the virus is mask wearing.

This is a graphic from Carnegie Mellon.

They've surveyed individuals for a number of months and have analyzed that data to indicate percentage of people wearing masks within each state and then percentage of those who know someone who is sick.

Their analysis demonstrates a strong correlation between mass burning and what we're seeing the highest rates of transmission or cases across the country.

If we flip back to that previous slide, you can see that the states in the upper Midwest are also the ones that have the people who aren't wearing or adhering to those masks most frequently as compared to other states.

I think that's a critical component as we head into late fall and winter, more people will be indoors.

The mask wearing combined with other mitigation strategies is going to be really critical.

I think this is a strong demonstration of how important that is.

Next slide, please.

Here in Virginia, this is a map posted on the Virginia Department of Health's website.

It's just a whole snapshot of where we've been since the beginning.

On this website, individuals can scroll over each locality to get more specific information.

There's a wealth of information on here.

There's multiple tabs, information about testing, percent positive, case rates.

outbreaks, tools that we use to sort of get a snapshot of what's happening in our localities, what's happening in the state.

So we can sort of help inform decision making about mitigation strategies that all may not be working and if we have to change any course and direction is related to where we're heading with the various trends.

Next slide, please.

One thing that's new and I think is an important part of how we're going to be able to inform decision making is the K-12 schools reporting outbreaks page that was introduced on Friday last week.

The goal of this is to demonstrate when an outbreak occurs, the number of cases, and then associated deaths within a particular school within a system.

This dashboard will include not only public schools, but all independent and private schools in a K-12 setting as well.

What you see here are the total number of outbreaks that have occurred since we've been tracking this.

cases there on the right for each outbreak.

And I'll note that the asterisk really means that there aren't enough cases to report because we want to make sure we're protecting personal health information and those who have had COVID.

That number, I believe, is five or fewer.

We will not actually post that number because it's lower than five.

And they would obviously track deaths.

The idea here is to provide some transparency into what's occurring in the schools as far as outbreaks and then to get a sense of how much are we seeing in schools.

It does help inform decision making in terms of are we putting in the right strategies at a particular facility, but then it informs decision making among those who are trying to open or considering reopening for in-person instruction to kind of see what it's been like so far this year.

Next slide, please.

This is a snapshot of what we reported out yesterday from our data portal.

We report new daily cases, total cases, hospitalized and fatalities, and the cases reported here are based on symptom onset.

So when a person first recognized that they had symptoms of COVID,

As you can see, we've had some ebbs and flow as of late September into October.

We saw some pretty big increases on the daily cases.

We've dropped off a little bit in early October, but now we're picking up again.

And I think this is sort of the nature of how COVID is going to work.

We'll see increases.

We'll work quickly to mitigate and then hopefully contain spread.

And then at some point we may see another increase.

Those increases have correlated to holidays, to increased gatherings based on the phasing guidance from the governor.

and certainly when students return to schools or in our case in September and October when the university reopened and had students back on grounds.

I will say at this point over the last couple weeks we've seen a little bit more increase and that's not necessarily specific to university and the students.

We're seeing more cases that have occurred outside of the university setting.

I'll show you a little bit more data here in a second but I think what we've seen is that as the university has

contained and mitigated spread through reopening rooms for isolation and quarantine.

We've seen some different settings for transmission among the community that's increased that shift from school and university transmission to community transmission.

Next slide, please.

This breaks things down a little bit more about the locality.

You can see Albemarle and Charlottesville by far have the most cases, hospitalizations, and then fatalities over the course of the pandemic.

And then below, you can see those ebbs and flows in data.

September and October, again, those increases largely attributable to students who were infected in closed housing situations.

But now we're seeing, again, a little bit more increase among community members.

And I will say, even though we saw larger numbers of cases coming from the university setting, we did not see transmission from students or faculty into the community.

The impact really was on the data, not so much on increased spread among community members.

Next slide, please.

Over the last three to four months, we've been sharing pandemic metrics with localities and schools to help inform decision-making.

There's some work being done right now, both at VDH and the governor's office, to hopefully make this publicly accessible to provide more insight and transparency into what's happening at the locality level.

Here on the left we see some numbers just some key numbers over the course of the last several weeks and I would point to the bottom for October 26, 2020 and we saw over the last seven days from the 19th to 26th 78 cases in Albemarle County and even though the percent positive is still down around 2.2 percent we are really looking at those raw numbers of cases seeing an increase in the case incidence rate per 100,000 on a daily basis

I think that's really important.

The university has really opened up PCR testing, the naval swab testing, but they've also opened up and then created access to saliva testing, identifying cases, isolating new cases, and then quarantining those who were exposed.

But what that means is that testing does count towards our public data.

It's important to understand that that positivity rate

maybe a little bit skewed by all of those tests that are being done.

And we really need to look at what we're seeing in terms of the raw data, the numbers of cases that we're seeing and where that transmission is occurring.

Next slide, please.

Here we see a similar slide for the city of Charlottesville.

Again, at the bottom, 70 cases over the previous seven days versus 45 the week before.

Percent positive again is going to be a little bit influenced by all the testing that's done at UVA.

And we are looking at that case incidence rate going up.

Over that time period for Charlottesville and Albemarle, we had 148 total cases.

41 of those are attributable to students at the university.

So that leaves 107 individuals in the community, which could be faculty at UVA, but in the community who tested positive.

And that again represents a shift from where we were a month ago with students having the large bulk of the new cases versus now where we see that more so in the community.

Next slide, please.

This really gets to a breakdown of our demographics.

Again, this is posted on our dashboard on our district website.

To the left, you see district population by race and ethnicity.

And on the right, you see where we're seeing disproportionate percentages of Black and Latino communities bearing the brunt of hospitalizations, fatalities, and cases.

We also see a pretty significant change when it comes to age.

So even though the majority of our cases are among those who are 10 to 19 and 20 to 29,

Those who are dying of COVID are in our older populations, 50 and above, based on living situations, conditions, and long-term and assisted living facilities.

So it really creates a disproportionate impact on age, race, and ethnicity.

And these are things that are holding true, certainly in Virginia, but also nationally.

It's created a current problem, and then it's going to be impacted in the future.

As we stated a little bit earlier, as we head into winter, it's going to create new challenges.

COVID isn't going away, but the challenges will increase.

And I think it's important for us to understand how we can address those now by strengthening what we've done.

And as Dr. Bonds will share here in a second, but also how we can adapt and become innovative even more to address those disparities.

So first, are there any

If it's okay, Mayor Walker, I would ask you and Vice President McDonald, would it be okay if we go ahead and allow Dr. Bonds to do her presentation, being mindful of the time, and then do all of our questions in one round?

Dr. Bonds, would that be okay with you?

That's fine with us.

So we wanted to talk a little bit about resilience in our community.

This has been a very trying few months for everyone involved, and I think it's worthy to spend a few minutes talking about resilience and some of the activities that are going on to promote resilience in our community.

So resilience here is our ability to cope with a variety of situations in a healthy and productive way.

There's many components to resilience, strengthening and promoting access to public health, healthcare, and social services is certainly one.

And as has been mentioned a couple of times, and I'll show a slide here in just a minute, there's been significant coordination between the city, the county, the health district, and many of our nonprofits

to provide wraparound services in our area.

Additionally, early on in the pandemic and continuing even now today, there were community-led testing events that were supported by both of our hospitals and by the health district.

In fact, we did one of the earliest community-led testing events in the state that was really spearheaded by citizens in the community trying to get access to testing for our vulnerable citizens.

Promoting health and wellness alongside disaster preparedness.

Medicaid enrollment has continued as people have lost their job and become eligible for Medicaid.

And then the Coalition for Mental Health and Wellness has provided a significant number of resources and has made lots of those available to citizens in our community to cope with the mental health effects of this pandemic.

If we could have the next slide, please.

There has been significant expanded communication and collaboration amongst all of the entities.

Early on, we had a joint information center that allowed us to share and provide information to our community.

using the resources of the city, the county, the university, and the health department.

There are a variety of other information sheets that are put out on a regular or semi-regular basis, including street sheets, the Staying Alive, and then the Charlottesville Albemarle COVID-19 Homelessness Response Team has also been a real example of collaboration amongst the various entities in our community.

Communities have led and designed many of these systems.

The Charlottesville Food Justice Network was really one of the driving forces behind the wraparound services.

Stepping outside of the COVID area, the Esmond Advisory Committee has been instrumental in designing what some of the services that are going on out there.

And the Southwood Resident Engagement has also been an example of how communities can really lead in designing systems for their benefit.

Social connectedness has been built.

There are a number of Facebook mutual aid groups, faith-based and civic networks, and the Charlottesville mascot, the group that really provided lots and lots of cloth-based coverings early on in the pandemic.

And then, of course, the wraparound food distribution services and other food distribution efforts that have gone on in our community.

Next slide, please.

We've heard a number of times about the wraparound services or the COVID care support services.

I just want to spend a minute kind of describing this because it's actually a really great example of how the joint efforts of nonprofits, government can come together in conjunction with our university partners to really benefit our community.

So this was initially organized by Cultivate Charlottesville.

At the bottom you can see all of the nonprofit and groups that have contributed to this effort in the area.

It started in late May and initially it was targeted at individuals who tested positive at community testing sites.

Those individuals are given a phone number to call to request services.

That phone number was provided by their physician.

Right now what we've done is switch that over to our case investigators here at the health department will now inquire when an individual from the community is tested positive and we do our case investigation about whether they need assistance during their quarantine or isolation period.

To date there have been requests from 47 households representing 218 individuals.

The services can provide food.

They can help with bill paying, getting prescriptions delivered to your home or other medication during the isolation period.

And depending on what's requested by the individual, shelf stable foods have been provided, prepared meals have been sent over, fresh produce, personal protective equipment, sanitation supplies, medication and financial assistance.

and these are delivered to the individual's homes by volunteers, either volunteers from the government or volunteers that are working with us here at the health department.

It's a no touch situation.

It's done through a phone call to the individual and then dropped off at their porch or in front of their front door.

Can I have the next slide, please?

Is it not this one, Dr. Bonds, public health success?

Yes, thank you.

I'm so sorry.

Public health successes.

So just a little bit about what we're doing here.

And part of the COVID response, we have engaged directly with our Latinx community to have them assist us in development of public health messaging regarding COVID.

There have been some social media messaging and videos that have been put out.

The Promotoras in the county have been really instrumental in distributing mass to individuals in the Latinx community.

We have partnered to develop a community resource guide for Charlottesville and Albemarle and right now we're working on that for other localities.

to help individuals who either are asked to quarantine or isolate or who need other resources because they've lost their job.

One thing we've done internally is shifted our contractor hiring process to focus on hiring from those communities that are impacted disproportionately by COVID.

So we have intentionally sought out individuals who are native Spanish speakers for example to assist us with our case investigation and contact tracing.

And when we have been faced with outbreaks in other language communities, we have worked to find individuals who are native speakers of that language to assist us in our investigation and to provide the education and support.

We have partnered with a private donor in our community to distribute more than 60,000 masks through libraries, pantries, faith-based groups, small businesses.

And that can continue in November when county schools begin to go back and city schools to provide them with needed cloth-based coverings.

Next slide.

Despite all of those successes, there are a number of challenges and opportunities I'd just like to make everyone aware of.

We certainly need more community health worker positions.

We know that this can be a really successful way to gain the trust of our communities.

To have individuals that are from that community work in partnership with us and with community members can really lead to

stronger relationships, a higher level of trust, which can allow us to help and provide services for those communities.

It's challenging under the current funding structure, but we think expanding those opportunities in the health department and in other government situations can be really beneficial.

I would be remiss in saying that the long-term disinvestment of public health and many of our other human resource agencies is not going to be fixed by the short-term bolus of funding that we've gotten with COVID.

Public health is one of those agencies that really needs substantial funding on a regular basis

to do its job correctly makes it very challenging when we're public health or other social agencies are underfunded and then are asked to respond as we have here in COVID.

Changing in policy makers can certainly influence equity initiatives if they're not built into the ordinances or policies or culture of the organization and I think

The MOU that's under discussion today is certainly a way to assure that this work continues on.

We are seeing a huge amount of COVID fatigue, both here internally in the health department, but I think even amongst the citizens in our community, people are really tired.

They're tired of the stress and anxiety that COVID has built up about not really knowing what the next phase is going to bring, not knowing if we're going to have a good vaccine when that's going to be available.

and we're just now beginning to see the impacts of that.

We know that it's really impacted our small businesses in our community.

Many individuals have been forced or have lost their job and been forced to seek unemployment and I think we're just beginning to see the start of how this is going to lead a long-term effect

And then finally, I think it's just really critical and it's something that we're doing here at the Health Department and that is putting equity as a core value rather than as an additional task.

So we at the Health Department have continued all of our equity trainings despite all of the work that's going on with the COVID response, because we have seen through COVID that equity really is critical to making sure that everyone has health in our community.

Dr. Bonds, thank you so very much.

I will go around as we've done with the other sections for any questions.

Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley?

No questions at this time.

Thank you very much, Dr. Bonds.

Thank you.

I have no questions.

I would hope that we get all these PowerPoints.

They're great and I'd like to review them and

Learn some more and learn everything better from both the UVA group and from Dr. Bonds.

And also, I apologize, but I really had a hard cutoff at four, so I'm going to have to leave.

But this has been really wonderful, and I appreciate everybody's time and efforts.

Thank you.

No questions.

Just a quick comment.

Thank you very much Dr. Bonds for this great and Ryan for this great presentation.

I think you sum it all up when you say on one of your slides center equity as a core value rather than just thinking of it as an additional task.

Thank you.

Yes, thank you very much.

If some of these answers are not available right now, then I will be glad for everyone to receive answers from you and Denise and Ryan tomorrow or something.

But I'm glad to learn about all these services that are being provided, but I am concerned about

how we can trust the data on the school page when five or fewer cases don't count, because that could be 50 to 500 new cases in a very short period of time.

So that's one concern.

There's been questions that aimed at me from constituents, especially ones whose children are in private school, because they do not get a sense that they are getting good information from their private school.

and or have been told by the understand that the school has been told by the health department that siblings do not need to stay home, for example, when there is a guaranteed place and this is raising anxiety all across the community.

So this is a different kind of

Information that's needed perhaps than the graphs, which are certainly valuable, but on a much more individual and personal level, no one is expecting identifying these families, but people in a school, parents need to know if someone in their child's grade has a sibling who is sick because they need to have the right to keep their child home if they choose or they live in a multi-generational family.

There's so many different

triggers for concern that many different families have.

And I know this is a really challenging question for you because you're trying to look at a global sense and I'm asking you from the minuscule sense and I understand that.

I was very alarmed today to see that after many weeks of having Virginia in the steady column, we are now shooting up.

So that was very disappointing.

And you mentioned about, or Ryan mentioned about the up and down data

and how we will need to change our mitigation strategies.

Well, what are the details about how we're going to do that?

Because those questions are already coming to me about when is the area going to evaluate and how are you going to evaluate what to do next when here we go again is the news.

So I will drop all those questions in your lap and ask you to answer them later if you can't answer them now.

So thank you for those questions.

One, I'm going to defer on your second question about information that we provide to the schools so that I can go and talk to the case investigators and find out what exactly we're advising and what we've been telling private schools.

With regards to the school outbreaks,

All school outbreaks are listed on that page, but they don't list the number if it's less than five.

So if, for example, we see in ABC Elementary School that they've had an outbreak that involves four students, they will be listed on the page.

They'll just be an asterisk, as you saw in those.

on the slide.

So parents and other community members will be able to go on and see that there were cases there and you can just interpret from the asterisk that it was less than five cases.

But that doesn't answer your second question and again I'll try and get some more information

In regards to the rising numbers, I think it is really concerning.

And I think part of this is, you know, winter is coming.

We're gonna see a lot of people moving to indoor activities which are higher risk, right?

This is an aerosolized virus.

We know that it's shared when you breathe out and there's less air turnover in an inside space.

and that I think is what's being reflected in the upper Midwest in the North Dakota area.

They're having the beginning of a very cold season and so people are going inside.

We know that there are things that will help.

So first of all, staying home.

Don't go out if you don't have to and wearing masks does help prevent it.

You have to wear a mask correctly.

So that has to be covering both your nose and your mouth.

and you have to wear them the entire time you're interacting with someone.

But I think the biggest part that's playing into that and will continue to provide messaging and I anticipate that we'll see guidance from the state too, is people are really tired.

It's been, and I don't mean that in a physical tired, I mean that in an emotional, it's been a really wearing and stressful time and I think

with the added stress of an election that's coming up next week and the uncertainty surrounding that election that's causing people to blood down their guard, essentially.

And so that's where I would ask all of you to really help us in educating your constituents and cheerleading them on that

We need to continue to do those mitigation measures that we know work.

We need to not go and have a big family Thanksgiving gathering.

We just canceled ours because the numbers are rising and we know that getting together is the number one cause of COVID outbreaks.

And we were planning to do ours outside.

So

It's sad.

I would love to see my sister.

I haven't seen her in months, but it's not safe.

And so we're going to do a Zoom Thanksgiving and we'll have the iPad set up at the end of the table and we'll all tuck into our turkey virtually.

And we can continue to give that message, but I think it's really helpful if people hear that message from other trusted figures like yourself.

So I will get back to you about the guidance that we're giving, particularly to private schools and siblings.

Thank you.

Please share with everybody because there are others may have the same concerns as well.

And one follow up quickly, if a school is not on the list, but they are telling their families that they have cases, that means they have not reported that to you.

So I just want to clarify, that's an outbreak.

And for an outbreak, many schools have had isolated cases.

In fact, I would argue that almost all schools have had isolated cases.

But that doesn't mean it's an outbreak.

So an outbreak for public health purposes is two cases that we can link together.

So two individuals that were in the same classroom who became ill at approximately the same time, or

Two individuals that one person rode on the bus and the other person rode on the bus within that same time period and we can link them together.

So lots of schools, lots and lots of places, lots of workplaces that had individual cases but they haven't had outbreaks of disease.

and an individual case not moving on to an outbreak is a success story, right?

That means that either the school or the workplace or wherever put in place the right mitigation measures that the individual who's infected did the right thing.

They stayed home during their infectious period.

Any individuals that might have been contact stayed home.

An individual case in a

Very good.

I'm sorry, Supervisor Price, I just wanted to do a quick time check.

I think folks realize that we are running a little bit behind, so when we complete the questions, hopefully we'll have a little bit of time to do the final thoughts and wrap up.

Thank you, Ms.

Russell.

Chair Galloway.

I have no questions at this time.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I have no questions.

I think that last comment about fatigue and COVID as a marathon reminds me of the proverbial wall that people say they hit at the 20 mile mark.

And I think Dr. Bonds, that's what you're describing.

People have hit the wall in this fatigue, but we know that the winter is coming.

So I very much appreciate those comments.

I don't have any questions at this time.

I don't know if any of my other colleagues do, but I don't.

And with a pause and no comments, Ms.

Excellent.

Thank you very much, Supervisor Price.

So we did want to take a little bit here to get some final thoughts and to wrap up.

Just doing a little bit of a listening check.

I think what we heard from the bodies today was the go-ahead on the language for the MOU with some

suggested revisions that we heard from Mayor Walker around the inclusive language and perhaps the addition or replacement with some language around welcoming.

So we'd like to get the go-ahead to bring that back to these bodies individually so that we're able to adopt them.

We're also interested in hearing a bit more.

I think we heard that there seemed to be some interest

in fleshing out measurable goals and in particular the potential of identifying one or two more immediate projects to do collaboratively.

All right and thank you Ms.

Russell.

I believe that you have adequately addressed and covered

What was the consensus from the board?

If we will just take a moment.

I'm not going to call names, but if any supervisor has anything they would like to add, otherwise we will pass it on to Mayor Walker.

Thank you.

The two things I'll add is in the We Pledge section, if we can just state clearly the allocation of ample resources or

something of that nature to send around to have everyone agree upon.

I just think we need to state clearly that resources are needed.

And then just a reminder that President Ryan wanted his team to, and I'm sure they'll do that, but to look at

You know, one of the earlier sections also, so just to get that done so that we can sign it.

Yeah.

So we can get that questions answered by all three entities so that we can move forward.

Yeah, just real briefly again, no comments or questions about the MAE or the language, but I do just want to, just because we have these three bodies convened here, I do just want to raise the alarm again about the issue of the housing crisis, evictions, and homelessness, particularly in the context of what we're seeing with our

revenue projections which are going down.

And I really don't think we've even begun to see the impact that COVID is going to have on evictions, homelessness, and the housing crisis.

And our resources are already stretched thin.

And I really don't think we're going to be able to meet this need unless we're acting regionally and collectively investing our resources.

Okay, thank you.

And I'm just closing, I guess on my end, it seems that the work that the three of you have been doing, Siri, Jackie and Kevin, I think it would be of all of our best interest for Next Steps for you all to let us know who should be a part of this group, whether it's just the three of you,

or if that extends to other staff members and elected officials or not.

And if we can get what those recommendations are from you all, if there's going to be a body other than the three of you.

I'd just like to thank Siri and Kaki for their collaborative spirit.

Thank representatives from the city and the county for their supportive sentiments.

Thank you, Vice President McDonald.

I'm going to turn it over to Chair Galloway for some closing comments before I formally adjourn.

Chair Galloway.

We did a pass on the questions for the COVID and I'm not going to delay because I know we're over time, but Siri I'm hoping that I throw this question out that I know it may be a future board meeting that this would come back relative to the Equity Atlas presentation.

That's a tool that I'm curious about training or further information for the board.

I've got a series of questions on that, so I'm just trying to bookend or if we can get on the agenda some further follow up on that to the Board of Supervisors.

As a comment, Mayor Walker, I appreciate your comment regarding participation by leadership on these meetings.

If it's going to be a joint effort, I agree with your remarks on that.

I do not believe any of our supervisors would disagree with that.

So I appreciate everyone getting here today and coming together today and on the work that we're going to be doing together to proceed.

Thank you, Chair Galloway.

And as a reminder, for anyone who is watching, I'm sure those who have participated have already done it.

But remember to vote.

And at this time, I will announce the adjournment of our meeting.

The Board of Supervisors will adjourn until November the 4th, 2020 at 1 p.m.

It will be an electronic meeting pursuant to ordinance number 20-A14.

An ordinance to ensure the continuity of government during the COVID-19 disaster.

Information on how to participate in the meeting will be posted on the Albemarle County website Board of Supervisors homepage.

I want to again thank the City of Charlottesville for your cooperation, collaboration, and participation as well as the University of Virginia and all of those who presented information to us today.

Thank you everybody.

And good night.

Bye bye.